THE BOWL AND THE QUILT

The Sadoo wishes in his blog to weave a strange quilt.  Not—it should be obvious—one that records his having omelets for breakfast and his little thoughts about the NFL.  He does not wish to post pictures of the breasts of Supermodels or discuss the relationship between the Canadian psyche and its suburban literature.  No, he has other little threads to weave.  He wishes to keep you suspended over the ultimate design of his comfy canopy.  What is the Vision he dreamt 20 years ago?  How shall it integrate or not with his Group Names and those additions of Others?  Will his Group Names ever be complete or are they, like desire, infinite?

Now that my method is clear (or methodology, as the academics prefer), allow me to foreshadow two of the imminent threads.

One is a meditation on the Tao Te Ching, a book which has fascinated The Sadoo with its natural polarity to the bulk of Christian texts and its this-worldly orientation.  Sadoo has taken to memorizing the DC Lau translation and, after each vignette is racing comfortably around with his blood, he allows it to speak itself through him.

Two is a more comic (or is it?) meditation on one of The Sadoo’s most excellent activities—scatting.  Sadoo has long noticed a distinct lack of adequate homage to the Noble Scat in literature.  Certainly Chaucer and Shakespeare exploited the fart and Bloom's lingering Pprrpffrrppffff in Ulysses does modern justice.  And a not incorrect interpretation of art in its entirety is that it's humanity's flatulence directed toward the heavens.  We wish for a voice to be heard, "Whoa ... my beloved species ... my Divine Nose! ... in whom I am ... phew! ... well pleased" ... it won't happen, of course, but we're genetically predisposed to keep trying.  He has also noticed that the traditional divine pantheons lack an adequate Holy Member to receive our praise and distress for what happens in The Bowl.

Being not just a taxonomist, but a scatologist, The Sadoo conjured with his hapless sadooic colleagues and, in a terribly joyous and volcanic moment, encountered Merdia—goddess of ribald smells and steaming coils.  All beauty is born in the toilet, all art crawls from mud and—as Yeats taught us—love itself has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement.  The Sadoo lives, as he must, in the source and origin of things, laughing at how others despise that source and yet depend on it for life and culture.  The Scat is where all things begin. Merdia must receive her due.

Weaving patterns in ways the loom directs, with a nidus of mothers and Tao and merde, the quilt begins.  I wish it to cover the earth with sleepy exuberant tones and the down of gods.

GROUP NAMES G - P

geeks	usurpation
geriatrics	complaint, olfactory, swallow
glass blowers	cunnilingus
gravediggers	descent, jukebox
guests	confusion, misunderstanding
heterosexuals	domination, constipation, despondency
husbands	cornucopia, temerity
impaired drivers	incarceration, spiritus, secretion, fumbling
janitors	doubt
journalists	despair, vomit, gall
kibitzers	deal, gratuity
lawyers	pomposity, jargon, bile
lepers	testament
lesbians	domesticity, lapidary
magicians	trace
mausoleum attendants	drawer, immobility, dearth
mayors	erection
mediums	acephalous
menstruators	funhouse
middle managers	mush, tenement
midwives	caesura
mistresses	codification, excess, levy, competition
mothers	album, query, blindness, sentimentality
mystics	eternity, negation
narcissists	reflection, kaleidoscope
neighbours	voyeurism, comparison, envy
newlyweds	shutter
nuns	beatitude, regress, murmur, hymen
nurses	fantasy, formaldehyde
nursing mothers	bouquet, areolae, murmur
ovulators	funhouse
perjurers	deception
philosophers	asomatous, labyrinth, consolation
piano tuners	intuition
piccoloists	fellatio
pimps	meanness
poets	preponderance, neglect, tedium
politicians	irrelevance
post-menopausals	historicity
preachers	deception, incinerator
presidents	repetition, cliché, forgettability
priests	consolation, pederasty
principals	grumpy
professionals	sorrow, pride, indistinction
professors	pretence, verbosity, abstruseness, tenure
programmers	carbonation, simulacrum, acronym
prostitutes	detachment, junction, diffusion
protestors	indignation, perturbation

GROUP NAMES A - F

We're all animals and if animals deserve anything, they deserve names. I've got a name - Sadoo.  You've got a name - Thanatos, Mooty-Socks, Wee Willie Wilbur, Alice Nd Çurap Mazlum ... whatever moved your mother in the weird reaches of the night.  But when you see a pack of chefs sauntering down the street, you don't (or shouldn't) say, "Hey, look at that pack of chefs."  You say (or should say), "Hey,  look at that arrogance of chefs."  And just as a pack of cats can be called a clowder, clutter, pounce, dout, nuisance, glorying, or glare (but not a pack) and kittens can be called a kindle, litter, or intrigue and cats wearing glasses can be called a geek, surprise, or impossibility and wild cats are simply a destruction, so those chefs can be many-named.


We'll do this in segments (beginning with A-F), interspersed with thoughts about pants, no-pants, underpants, uberpants, and--of course--farting.  Add your own names, your own groups.  Disagree with me.  Share the names with your friends and enemies.  Start using them in public.  Let's get them in the dictionary before we die.

adulterers	transgress, alibi, caprice
accountants	deceit, morgue, receipt, conceit
agents	veiling, unveiling
anarchists	constitution, vacancy, non-existence
architects	erection, fenestration
baptismal candidates	cowardice, wetness, confession
bastards	stew, confusion
believers	lobotomy, earnestness, syllogism
bums	query, emancipation
cashiers	catastrophe, mausoleum, flirtation
chefs	competition, arrogance, suicide
children	amorality
consultants	semiotics, jealousy
couriers	illegality
cowards	comfort, tradition, omnipresence
crossword addicts	cabal
cuckolds	camaraderie, barnyard, greenhouse, serenity
dancers	anorexia, diet
doctors	obfuscation
donut-lovers	cancer, exegesis
dropouts	icharus
engineers	balustrade, catapult, kingdom, input, euphemism (sanitation)
entrepreneurs	resurrection, hummer
epileptics	unpredictability
executives	clone, treason
farmers	reduction, irrelevance
fashion students	aggression
fathers	memory, poverty, absence
fornicators	ingress, confession, condom
freshmen	syphilis

A PEJORATIVE OF TAXONOMISTS

It was 20 years ago today not that Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play but that I received a vision.  Like any normal sadoo, I’ve had visions of everything from braless angels descending countless ladders in fluttery bliss from heaven onto my priapic bed … to vermiculous apocalypses so horrific the very retelling of them would kill you.  But on January 25 1990, shortly before my final son was born, three de-wombed children sweetly farting in their sleep, in the happy desolate hours of the night, after an evening of far too many Brussels sprouts, I received a vision that united time, myth, nature, technology, humanity, art, and god; in the morning, over a breakfast of vast toddler demands and oatmeal, I determined that the vision was conceptually sound and imaginatively potent.

It was, I confess, a taxonomic vision.  Which sounds less healthy than it should.

The sadoo—a human type I do not advocate but only describe in a shadowy attempt to name what I seem to be—is, among other things, a competent taxonomist.  There are those, naturally, who despise taxonomists.  Back in the days I mingled with the named, I met with Eric McLuhan—one of Marshall’s many Catholic-spawned children.  More ignorant than I should have been about the politics of such a statement, I referred to Northrop Frye in a vaguely positive way; this provoked a terse dismissive response, of which academics seem to be particularly fond.

Frye, McLuhan said with religious and contemptuous finality, was a taxonomist.

What a vile tribe I belong to! I thought, pained and bleeding.  How despised and rejected of men, men of sorrows and acquainted with grief, are we taxonomists!  I went home and built Lego fairies with my children to escape the horror of the new knowledge of what I was.

Even now, recalling that trauma, I find myself slightly weepy and realize I may not have the strength today to share my taxonomic vision with you.  Please believe me:  I so want to tell you what makes a beautiful taxonomy—one so magnificent politicians become poets and the Fortune 500 forget how to count.  I so very very much want to tell you … when I’m ready for it, when you’re ready for it, when the world’s ready for it … what my perfect taxonomic vision is.  But I must wait, Dearly Beloved, until the proper time.

It’s all about waiting.  It’s all about the proper time.

In the meantime … to wet your pants … here’s what’s coming next in The Secular Sadoo … something you need, something you’ve been waiting for—a desperate lacuna in the very miasmic fabric of language:  group names for groups that don’t have names.  That is:  if a bunch of crows is called a murder and a bunch of waterfowl is called a knob, what should a bunch of lawyers be called? A bunch of administrative assistants? Pimps? Desperados?  Should they all be called a bunch?  No.  Oh no no no.

I have been given the names for such bunches, people.  In another vision.  And I shall share these names with you.  I shall share them with you soon.  And your lives shall be changed.

THE SECULAR SADOO

I am a sadoo—not a sadhu—and this blog is the imaginative wandering of this particular sadoo.  Let me explain.

I am not a sadhu because:

• I was born a Jesus-thumping Christian near the epicenter of the West, not a Hindu in poop-mad India;
• I do not believe in liberation, renunciation, or asceticism;
• I experience yoga’s practitioners as gummi worms thrashing in a sea of processed sugar.

I am a sadhu because:

• I am a mystic;
• I am a wandering monk—attached to no cause but wandering—which in the language of the West might be called a flâneur;
• I am adept at curses.

This condition I-am-not-I-am I name a sadoo—vile, sensuous, amoral and apolitical, cosmopolitan, aesthetic, religious, skeptical, gleefully intelligent, verbal, and witty, detached, happily and acutely judgmental, raunchy.  I name this combination of attributes holy, for it sets the sadoo apart both from the common fawning hordes overtly or covertly seeking money, fame, power, reputation, security, admiration, and pleasure and the sadhus—and their spiritual relatives across the religious world—who strive (or pretend to strive) to transcend (or pretend to transcend) the bloody, schizophrenic, bound condition of flesh.

As a sadoo, I do not believe in striving, for there is nothing to strive for.  The world is perfect in its imperfection and this thought—that there is no other world—is the one thought that is anathema to civilized humanity.

So I wander in the world, watching its possible demise through the human clambering for progress, and blow bubbles of words in the greater bubble of blog.